You can’t always get what you want. And as Mick Jagger didn’t add, sometimes the best you can hope for is just to stop other people getting it. At the time of writing, I don’t yet know exactly how that process has panned out for the people of Gorton and Denton in the kind of byelection Labour should normally win at a canter but which instead became a three-way race with Reform UK and the Greens, and a broader metaphor for the collapse of old certainties.

But for anyone chiefly motivated by keeping Reform’s Matt Goodwin out of Manchester, what’s clear is that the baffling process of trying to calculate your vote by second-guessing what everyone else is doing, while worrying that you might accidentally make things worse, did not necessarily feel like democracy at its finest. And unless something big changes, millions of us could be doing something similar at the next general election, in seats across the country where things have changed so much since 2024 that it’s no longer clear who is the “Stop Farage” candidate and who is the wasted vote. Which will lead some to wonder: is this really the best our electoral system can do?

Already the Electoral Reform Society is arguing that this byelection illustrates everything wrong with first past the post (FPTP): campaigns bogged down in arguing over who can beat whom rather than what anyone actually stands for inside a system designed for a world that no longer exists. FPTP’s winner-takes-all design is built around the idea of two main parties and prioritises the swift formation of majority governments: though harsh on smaller parties, it’s done a sterling job of keeping extremists out of British........

© The Guardian